The field of exploration seismology, also known as geophysical surveying, is a relatively new and developing field of science and technology. Exploration seismology seeks to characterize the structure and distribution of materials below the earth's surface by processing seismic waves transmitted into the subsurface and reflected back from subsurface features. Imaging of subsurface features by analysis of seismic waves involves collecting relatively vast amounts of data that sample a time-dependent pressure wavefield and applying computational methods to solve for initially unknown boundary conditions that, together with the acoustic and/or elastic partial-differential wave equations and initial values, specify the time-dependent pressure wavefield.
Despite a steady increase in the computational processing power and the electronic data-storage capacities of modern computer systems, seismic-exploration data analysis has continued to be constrained by processing and data-storage costs and by the bandwidths and capacities of modern computer systems, even when advanced distributed supercomputer systems are employed. As a result, researchers, developers, and practitioners of seismic-exploration-related analytical methods continue to seek computationally efficient approaches to processing of the vast amounts of digitally encoded data collected during seismic-exploration operations which can, in turn, facilitate more cost-effective use of experimental equipment and more accurate subsurface-feature characterizations.